How do you school an eight year-old in the ways of this country? As rich
Russians clamour to send their children to our most elite schools, Jane
Flanagan meets the 'super tutor' helping them

Water cascades down the miniature makeshift mountain, dragging tiny plants, pebbles and soil with it. Holding a now-empty jug, eight-year-old Yan Kolpakov giggles as his tutor uses her hands to dam the muddy flow, while delivering a florid narrative on the miracles of the water cycle.

“Do you see, my darling, how those little stones are first washed down the river and then settle? Meanwhile the sun is shining, the water is evaporating and just look at that serious erosion! As for all those trees and plants, they’re transpiring like fury! Is that making sense to you, my dearest angel?”

Kate Nicholls’s theatrical delivery betrays an eclectic career trajectory that began in the Royal Shakespeare Company and then veered off into science. But, today, aged 58 and a grandmother-of-three, Nicholls is following a new calling – as a “super tutor” to the Russian elite.

It’s a burgeoning industry. While a growing number of professional British families, who would have once sent their children to private school, struggle to afford the fees, schools in the independent sector are receiving an increasing number of applications from wealthy Russian parents.

The number of pupils with parents living in Russia has more than doubled in the past five years, from 816 in 2007 to 1,722 in 2012, according to the Independent Schools Council (and these figures don’t include children whose families have relocated to the UK).

They are attracted to Britain for a whole host of reasons: the shambolic state (as they see it) of Russian education; the international reputation of British public schools and their record of producing well-educated, well-rounded individuals; and a benign tax regime which has made the UK, and London in particular, a magnet for Russians.

But getting their children the “right” education has not been as simple as they imagined. The most sought-after public and prep schools restrict their numbers of foreign students and the competition for these places has never been more intense, nor the institutions more discerning. Applicants to schools such as Westminster, St Paul’s and Wellington have to pass the rigorous entrance exam, obviously, but they also have to be fluent in English, prove themselves in non-academic disciplines such as sport, music or drama, and convince the school that they’ll fit in.

A day under Nicholls’s tutelage offers her pupils as much insight into English culture, food and humour as the entrance exams she prepares them for. Lessons, which take place in her house in Kensington, London, happen mostly in the morning on a one-to-one basis. Afternoons are set aside for excursions – to a local market, where the children are given money to negotiate over fruit and vegetables or to museums or historical landmarks.

Yan was one of the first Russian children Nicholls home-schooled. She had recently returned from 15 years in Africa and was contacted by Maria Amenitskaya, an education consultant who had heard about Nicholls from a colleague and was impressed by the results Nicholls had achieved with her own children, whom she had home-schooled and who had been offered places at American universities including Stanford and Cornell, and at Oxford.

Yan’s family had just arrived in London, he had just one word of English and his parents wanted to know how long it would take Nicholls to get him ready to sit prep-school entrance exams. “I simply had no idea,” she recalls. “I asked them to give me one term with him, and then to ask me that question again. ‘Fruittella’ – that’s the only word he knew in English, the name of his new favourite sweet.

“I had Yan all day, six days a week for a complete immersion in English language, history and culture. He didn’t understand a word I said to begin with, but like all my Russian students after him, Yan was very bright, keen to learn and so, after that first term, I told his parents he would be ready to sit the entrance exams after just one more.

“He got into every school he applied to and is doing brilliantly. He comes to me for the odd lesson in his holidays, but he more than keeps up with his British contemporaries and now sounds about as English as they do.”

Nicholls’s success led to Amenitskaya, director of Anglia Education Consulting, recommending her to other Russian families for whom Nicholls provides “a very useful bridge” into their new lives in England. “For many Russian children the regime of boarding school can come as a bit of a shock,” Amenitskaya explains. “Coming from well-off families, they’re not used to a bedroom without an en-suite bathroom, for example, or sharing with other children or being away from home and not having a concierge.”

Nicholls, who teaches children between the ages of seven and 18, puts up some of her pupils in her own home, to give them the “boarder experience”. But, although pampered (one pair of siblings were driven to her house from the Ritz each morning), they are not from the very richest families in Russia. Stricter international laws over the movement of money, the collapse of the Russian stock market and the increasing power of Vladimir Putin have dwindled the ranks of the stereotypical Russian oligarch and seen the emergence of a new generation of comparatively muted “minigarchs” who, according to Amenitskaya, “feel more at home in London than probably any other European city”.

A senior housemaster at one of Britain’s oldest schools expresses some relief at this development. “A few years ago, the arrival of new Russian boys into the school could often be a very cloak and dagger affair – with helicopters landing in nearby fields, minders, and fees being offered in cash. Cultural blood feuds spilt over into the dorms – I remember an actual fight with knives between a Russian and a Kazak over some loss of face or sign of disrespect.

“These days, the Russian families we see on open days are very much more low-key. We choose the boys we feel are confident enough to get the most out of the boarding experience and be comfortable with the culture of the school. They seem to find friends quickly, work hard, keep up with the banter and, after a short while, it’s only their names that give away their nationality. Out of all the foreign boys we have in our houses, it is the Russians who now seem to find it the easiest to fit in.”

Amenitskaya agrees that expatriate Russians are slowly shedding their rather unflattering reputation. “They have started to realise they cannot go about things in the same way as they would at home.

“During the process of preparing their children for English schools, parents learn as much about the culture of the country they have moved to as their youngsters. I’m occasionally contacted by mothers who need advice about what is expected of them in certain situations. If their child is invited to spend a weekend with an English family, for example, I might get a call to find out if they would be expected to offer any payment. The learning curve can be quite steep.”

Nicholls commends them for even attempting it. “It’s brave what they are doing for their children, really, and it’s not because they want to turn them into little English boys and girls, but because education is treasured in their culture. Many of the families I deal with talk of their great sadness at what they see as a hideous decline in standards in their own academic institutions.”

Denis Khodjaev’s seven-year-old son Max spent eight weeks being taught by Nicholls last year. The family have since returned to Moscow where Max continues to have three lessons a week via Skype.

“Twenty years ago we had one of the best education systems in the world and now we do not,” he says. “The rate of pay for teachers is poor and there is an element of corruption.” (One of Russia’s most popular comedy shows features a fictitious teacher, Snezhana Denisovna, who is continually devising scams to make money from her students.)

“Kate doesn’t just teach Max how to speak English,” Khodjaev continues. “She’s opened him up to the world of ‘being English’. When Max was with Kate every day was an adventure. She found ways of exciting him about the subjects he finds difficult.”

On the day of my visit, Nicholls was concluding a six-hour Skype tutorial with a child in Moscow which included a science experiment involving a bottle of fizzy drink and a packet of mints.

“I love to do messy work with my Russian children,” she says. “I find they aren’t used to getting their hands dirty. But they soon get used to it when they’re with me and realise that the fun really is worth all the cleaning up.”

Nicholls, who is the aunt of the actor Tom Sturridge (Sienna Miller’s fiancé), also takes them to the theatre and art galleries and arranges tennis lessons and wall climbing. But, while part of her role is to teach students about English manners and customs, she insists she is not running a “finishing school”. She does not teach elocution or deportment. And she has learnt that there are certain Russian ways that can’t be challenged.

“Like cold drinks!” she laughs. “Russian mothers, bar none, always implore me never ever to give their children drinks from the fridge, or with ice. They genuinely think cold drinks are a health hazard, it is so intriguing. They are very anxious about their children getting ill.”

The competition to support Russian families in their quest to educate their children in Britain is fierce and a number of tutorial colleges targeting the Russian market have sprung up which Nicholls is happy to concede may well enjoy the same success that she does.

One woman, Dina Karpova, a former aerospace engineer, works with a company called English Mentors to teach children not just how to pass the exams, but also how to shoot, play polo and choose a suit.

But Nicholls takes a more down-to-earth approach. “I’m not so formal,” she says. “The children who spend their days with me see how I interact with visitors, with neighbours, other people we get chatting to, and absorb the sort of social interaction that reflects life in Britain.

“I teach my young Russians with the same passion I taught my own children and I love the fact that home schooling is enabling me to fund my youngest son’s college education in America. I can empathise with these families because I know what it’s like to live in another culture – it’s exciting but bewildering too.”